1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to the art of conducting e-commerce transactions over a network. More particularly, the invention relates to a method of providing feedback between users of an e-commerce site utilizing predefined sets of comments.
2. Background of the Invention
The emergence of electronic commerce has revolutionized the manner in which goods and services may be bought and sold. In particular, the development of online auctions conducted over the Internet have enabled individuals to sell items with relatively little effort or expense while at the same time reaching a much larger potential pool of buyers than using more traditional means such as classified advertising and garage sales.
In a typical online auction, a seller submits an offer to sell an item, the item becomes available for bidding for a predetermined period of time. Buyers are able to view a description and often an image of the item, and submit bids. The potential buyer who tenders the highest bid “wins” the auction provided his bid is in excess of any minimum price required by the seller, and a contractual obligation is created in which the buyer and seller are required to complete the transaction.
It is the completion of the transaction, i.e., the exchange of the seller's item for the buyer's payment that is the potentially most perilous part of the transaction. More often than not, a buyer and seller are located far apart from each other, often in separate states or countries (from herein state or states unless otherwise stated shall refer to both states of the United States, as well as other countries or nations). Accordingly, the promised item and payment must be shipped via the post or some other package delivery service. A seller may request payment prior to shipping the item or the seller may require cash on delivery (COD). In either case, the buyer will not have the opportunity to verify the item was as the seller represented it, until after payment. The item shipped may end up being broken or in worse condition than represented; or if the seller is particularly unscrupulous, a dummy item may be shipped in place of the promised item. On the reverse, where a buyer pays with a check, he may stop payment on the check shortly after receiving the item, defrauding the seller of his item. Given the geographic distance between the typical buyer and seller and the relatively small values of the items being bought and sold, it is seldom practical for the aggrieved buyer or seller to seek recourse in the courts.
In order to combat the problem of dishonest and/or unscrupulous users, online auction services such as eBay, Inc. of San Jose, Calif., have instituted mechanisms to combat fraudulent and dishonest practices among buyers and sellers. For instance, eBay requires each user to register with the service before offering an item for auction or bidding on an item. In order to complete registration, the user must provide either a verifiable e-mail address (i.e., one that cannot be easily set up using a pseudonym) or a credit card number. If eBay determines that a registered user is utilizing improper buying or selling practices, it can ban the user from using the auction facility in the future.
Another practice used by some auction services is to provide the buyer and seller with a feedback forum in which either user can leave comments about the other that may be of use to other users in the future in deciding whether to bid or sell from a particular user. Comments are typically positive, but a few negative comments can act to indicate a user that is not completely honest and who should be dealt with cautiously.
A representative example of a list of comments made about a user is provided in prior art FIG. 1 (the e-mail addresses of the users have been masked). A score that is indicative of the user's trustworthiness with regard to online auction transactions is determined based upon the number of positive, neutral and negative comment the user has received. Comments about registered user may be entered into the system through a feedback forum or through a feedback prompt provided to the successful bidder and the auctioneer upon the conclusion of a particular auction transaction.
Prior art FIG. 2 provides an example of a feedback screen that may be displayed to a user who desires to leave a comment about another user. The commenting user enters his or her ID into box 205, and his password into box 210. The ID of the user being commented on (or targeted user) is entered into box 215 and the transaction to which the comment is related is entered into box 220. The commenting user chooses the appropriate radio button as shown at 225 to indicate whether the comment is positive, neutral or negative. A free-form text comment is left in box 230 that can be up to 80 characters long. Finally, the comment is sent to the auction service for posting by clicking the “leave comment” box 235.
Once a comment is posted about a targeted user, that user may leave a responding comment to which the commenting user may respond. Since both the buyer and the seller may leave a comment with regard to a transaction, and respond to each other's comments and subsequently respond to each other responses, a total of up to six comments may be left for any single transaction.
Each comment is typically associated with the user making the comment and the user for whom the comment is intended, as well as the transaction to which the comment relates. Each comment must be stored in the auction service's storage devices. It can be appreciated that where a large number of auctions are regularly being concluded, the amount of storage space required to store all feedback comments is very large. For example, if the maximum of six 80-character comments are left for each transaction, approximately 0.5 kilobytes of storage space is necessary to store the comments. If it is considered that a service like eBay concludes tens of millions of auctions each year and that comments about particular users are stored for years, the amount of storage space is significant.
A feedback system as described above also presents several other problems: (1) there is no efficient and convenient manner of translating comments into other languages, and (2) in certain jurisdictions, the auction service may face liability for publishing slanderous comments or comments with inappropriate content. In current feedback systems, a commenting user may leave a comment in any language he desires. For instance, a German user may purchase an item from a U.S. user and at the conclusion of the transaction, leave a comment about the U.S. user in German. This comment will have little meaning to other U.S. users who view the comments about the U.S. user unless they read German. Essentially in this situation, the feedback system, at least partially, fails in its purpose of providing useful information to auction users about other users.
Given the sheer volume of comments left each day on a large system like eBay, it is impractical to screen every comment for slanderous or libelous language before posting the comment on the system for other users to read. Accordingly, users may leave inappropriate comments for other users, which may cause the auction service which published the comment to incur civil and/or criminal liability for the comment under the laws of certain states. For instance, the slander and libel laws of Great Britain are stricter than those in the United States, and in certain Muslim states, publishing comments containing language of an inappropriate nature may be viewed as illegal.